Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Francesca Brendale. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Francesca, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been the best thing you’ve ever seen (or done yourself) to show a customer that you appreciate them?
Keys Cafe has had the most loyal customers over the past 50 years of being open. We are so grateful to have the best customers who keep coming back week after week. Many times when we have our regulars celebrate their birthdays with us we will treat them to a free slice of cake (an upgrade from the regular free cookie on their birthday!) Even to our newcomers we are happy to go above and beyond to show how much we value their patronage. My grandmother and founder of Keys Barbara Hunn once heated up one of our soups after a customer came in after closing because they were hungry and even though to didn’t have enough to cover the bill she accepted what she could pay and let her stay and eat while we finished closing up. There was even a time that we ran out of chicken salad and in the middle of a busy Saturday lunch service Barbara went into the kitchen to whip up a fresh batch for this customer. It’s examples like these that help light the way for all of our staff members to treat all customers like family day in and day out!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Keys Cafe is all about family. We’ve been family owned and operated for 50 years at all of our locations throughout the Twin Cities and Hudson Wisconsin. We proudly serve breakfast all day with fresh cracked eggs, caramel rolls, muffins and more baked daily at our on site bakeries. We have customers and employees that have been faithfully in our doors for decades. Each location provides the same yummy food while still retaining a unique vibe for everyone to be able to claim their favorite. We set ourselves apart from other cafes by mashing our own potatoes, roasting our own turkeys, mixing our own meatloaf and using our own coveted recipes for our gravies, pies and cakes. We love being in the Twin Cities and Hudson, Wisconsin because our customers are the best and because we are one of the most family friendly restaurants we’ve gotten to grow up with most of them! As being a granddaughter of our founder Barbara I am the most proud of the fact that we’ve been serving homemade food for all of these years with a family of bakers, servers, cooks managers that I’ve known since I was young. It is with their hard work and dedication to serving the food we grew up with that Keys Cafe has become a household name in the Midwest.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Keys Cafe met it’s biggest struggle through the pandemic and it’s effect on the restaurant industry. We are so blessed to be able to say we made it through and are still going strong, Being family owned and having all of our locations able to link together and lean on each other for support, advice and even a shoulder to cry on made getting through uncharted waters a little bit easier. There were times where we had a days notice to close down and times where we had a days notice that we could reopen again with a new set of regulations and rules to keep our patrons safe and we were happy to roll with the changes and do what we had to do to continue serving our communities. It was so important to us that we could maintain a sense of normalcy in a very uncertain time for the world. I am so proud of my family, our staff and our customers for the resiliency that was shown during this time.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Keys Cafe online has been growing and growing over the past 30 years! We first started with a webpage KeysCafe.com which we continue to build and update to be current and in the past 20 years we’ve made a Facebook page, Twitter page and Instagram page! Our growth has been completely organic as we have tried different way to try and reach new customers through these social media platforms. My favorite way to expand our customer base is to give away Minnesota Wild Tickets! Being mostly based in the great state of hockey we will hold a contest to have customers post photos and share our page and we will randomly select a winner to get the tickets. This is a great way to get our page shared while giving back to our customers.
Contact Info:
- Website: Www.KeysCafe.com
- Instagram: @keyscafe
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/105939839444635/
- Twitter: @keyscafe
- Youtube: KeysCafe